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Landscape with Landscape

por Gerald Murnane

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667397,011 (3.64)4
Landscape with Landscape is Gerald Murnane's fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. 'I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years,' Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In hindsight it can be seen to contain some of his best writing, and to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, 'The Battle of Acosta Nu', is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.… (más)
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I'm somewhat agnostic about Murnane, Australia's Calvino, but his shorter fiction is perhaps his ideal outlet. Ideas crawling over each other, as Durrell once said, like crabs in a basket. Very worthwhile little peeks under the rug at what lies beyond our conception of literature... ( )
  therebelprince | Oct 24, 2023 |
With his usual pleasure in sowing doubt and confusion in the reader's mind, Murnane gives us a funny, touching and very-obviously-autobiographical account of his first sexual experiences and how he became a writer, telling us how he came to write his first published story. That story comes next in the book, and turns out to be a funny, touching and very-obviously-autobiographical account of his first sexual experiences and how he became a writer, completely contradicting the first one, and telling us how he came to write his first published story, which comes next in the book. He does that six times, with the last story in the book claiming to tell us all about the genesis of the first one... Fiction is fiction, we are supposed to realise, and if you choose to draw conclusions from it about the real world you do so at your own risk.

We learn that his sole literary influence was Giacomo Leopardi, or Jack Kerouac, or A E Housman, that he has or doesn't have a wife and one or more children, that he was a loner or hung around drinking with beatniks or teaching colleagues or cousins or artists, and that he is convinced that he is a descendant of Australian emigrants living among Paraguayans in the Paraguayan city of Melbourne (with its Paraguayan green-and-yellow trams and its Paraguayan social rituals revolving around canned beer and television). The only common threads he allows us to find are in the progression from being an insecure and sexually inexperienced adolescent to becoming an adult failed writer who has unsatisfactory relationships with women and drinks too much. Which we don't necessarily have to believe either...

Murnane's landscapes may be confined to the suburbs of Melbourne, sometimes even to one particular garden in one particular suburb, but they are clearly crucial to his technique. Writing is the process by which he places himself and other characters in the picture, somewhere in that landscape.

Beautiful, clever, very idiosyncratic writing. ( )
2 vota thorold | Jul 28, 2021 |
A puzzle: an author completely in control, and yet utterly uncontrolled

Murnane writes exceptionally strong fiction, in the sense that his pieces have a consistent inner logic, steady pacing, and unfaltering attention to a problem or idea. If literary strength can be partly partly comprised of those qualities, then Murnane is one of the world's major writers. The caveat, for me, is that I am not sure how much of his writing Murnane controls, and how much is the result of a way of thinking that is, broadly speaking, on the autistic spectrum, and only occasionally interecting with the project of writing fiction. None of us has full control of either our intentions or our literary structures, and I do not object to rule-generated fiction. But with Murnane, the uncontrolled, compulsive, automatistic elements are both fundamental and pervasive, so reading is divided: I can read the work as fiction, meaning as intentional invention, but I need to also read it as symptom.

The clearest sign that fiction is only one of several interchangeable modes in which Murnane records his thoughts is the existence of his forty-odd filing cabinets filled with a "personal" or "chronological archive" of twenty drawers (including notes on every woman he went out with), a "literary archive" in tweleve drawers, and filing cabinets filled with an elaborate information about two horse racing leagues, including the names and studbooks of every horse, all their races, invented pennants, chronology, and places, all invented. (Some of this is in the New York Times Sunday Magazine profile, which I refer to on another Goodreads review; the counts of drawers are from an interview with Antoni Gach, Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall 2013.)

I will only give one example of this double reading here. One of the stories in this collection is "The Battle of Acosta Nu."

[A note about spoilers. This is literary fiction, so the concept of a spoiler does not apply: what matters is the way the work is constructed. In this review I reveal something that happens toward the end of one of Murnane's stories: but it isn't a spoiler. There is, in the final paragraph of the story I'll describe, an existential turn, which could be imagined as a spoiler. I won't mention it. But the fact that mentioning it could undermine a reading of the story may be a sign that it is not integrally part of the story. But I'll leave that for some other analysis.]

The narrator descends from Australians, but lives in Paraguay. He has never been to Australia, but he is exclusively preoccupied with what he imagines as Australia, and the presence of covert, perhaps unconsciously Australian people in Paraguay. His son falls ill, and over the course of the story, slowly worsens and dies. In that sense the story's model is "The Death of Ivan Ilych," except this is sociopathically cold and affectively nearly absent.

As his son lies in his hospial bed, struggling for life, the narrator thinks:

"Standing awkwardly apart from them I felt compelled to perform some Australian gesture in that room where the very air seemed oppressively Paraguayan. In the corner was a couch where a parent could sleep during a night watch. I sat down on this couch and took out of my bag a book of fiction that as my current reading. I thought I noticed a sudden tension in the room as the doctors and nurses noticed one by one what I was doing and looked at me curiously. I hoped I was not mistaken; it would have cheered me just then to have those orthodox Paraguayans wondering what subject could be so important that a man would want to read about it while his son lay fighting for his life nearby." (p. 87)

These episodes of cognitive dissonance, in which the father thinks only of his imagined Australian and Paraguayan identities, continue to the very end. In the last ten pages they are increasingly striking and bizarre, and it seems clear that in the logic of the narrative they are signs of the father's inability to connect and to be fully present at the death of his son. The entire story is a consistent parable about lack of feeling and lack of capacity for feeling.

That is a first reading, done without knowledge of Murnane, the author. In a interview in 2013 (in the journal cited above), Murnane said two momentous things had happened in his otherwise unmemorable life, which he had spent exclusuvely in Victoria--he never traveled outside Australia, and rarely outside the suburbs of Melbourne. The first was when he held his dying son in his arms, and then his son revived; and the second was the more recent death of his wife He said he hadn't yet written about his wife's death, because usually there was a time lag between such an event and the fiction that came from it.

"There's always this time lag... my son fell seriously ill in 1977. And it was five years before I fictionalized that experience, in something that's a sadly neglected piece of fiction. This piece is in "Landscape with Landscape." It's called "The Battle of Acosta Nu." Everything's almost, the medical details of that are exactly as they were in real life, so to call it, except that in real life the son is revived after his heart stopped beating, but in the story he doesn't, he's not revived." (p. 36)

Notice the phrase, "so to call it." Murnane has said that in different ways, he considers his fictions as real as so-called real life, and in some ways even more so, and he has always spoken of his "fictions" as if they were problems to be solved, or inquiries, and not fictions in the usual sense, except in terms of readers' expectations. Note also the weird present tense in the next clause: "the son is revived," as if his son was a character in fiction.

With this knowledge in mind, a re-reading of "The Battle of Acosta Nu" reveals an author (Murnane, not the anonymous implied author of the text, as in Genette's readings) who believes he is writing a "fiction" about a man who lives in a place he, Murnane, has never been, and who also knows that he is somehow, after "a time lag," writing a "fictionalized" account--that is, he's coming to terms with the experience of nearly having lost his son by writing about a man who could hardly bear to think about losing a son. He is encountering the unthinkable experience by imagining a person who could nor encounter the unthinkable experience.

A difficulty, for me, is that knowing this, I see the story not as a controlled fiction, but as an uncontrolled, automatically generated text that uses its narrator's emotional absence to convince the author that he has thought things through. Toward the end of the story, where the son is clearly dying and the father still thinks about Australian identity, the surreal juxapositions of unspeakable suffering and unaccountable detachment are clearly devised to shock. After his son dies, the narrator walks out of the hospital:

"Outside the hospital I walked beside a busy road that led into the centre of Melbourne," he writes, shocking us as readers, since he has always been in Paraguay. "It was a cool cloudless morning that promised another of those autumn days more Australian than Paraguayan." The explanation shows he is, in fact, in Paraguay, but that's another shock because it shows how little he is thinking about his son.

Earlier in the story, however, the juxtapositions of events in the narrator's life and his preoccupations happen more slowly, more organically, and that is where I lose the ability to understand this fiction as a piece that was planned around a certain idea (a man who thinks only of an Australia he's never seen, no matter what happens to him). Instead I am presented with a writer, Murnane, who is himself in the hurricane of his thoughts, which tear him from the "so called" real world and into his writing, whether it's about imaginary horse races or his own son. In "The Battle of Acosta Nu" he sets out to think about his son by writing about a man who cannot not think about his son, and he sets up a simple and strong rule to keep his story in order: the man sees everything in the world as a problem of hidden Paraguayan and Australian identities.

But Murnane is not in control of this simple and strong idea. It is not a strategy for fiction or for mourning: it is simply the way he thinks. It's a kind of writing that pretends to be in complete control, by an author who believes himself to be in complete control, but he is not: his writing is also a symptom of a syndrome that happens to include work that other people read as fiction.
1 vota JimElkins | Dec 25, 2020 |
Murnane's fiction is like Bernhard's; someone, not me as far as I can remember, described Bernhard's books as slices of a long sausage, and Murnane's works--at least prior to Barley Patch--might be described as slices from a long Lamington.

LwL gives you everything you'd expect: some realistic memoiry seeming realism, some very odd imaginings, much consideration of what it means to live more or less in your own head, and a yearning for something else, without really defining what that something else might be. As I read it, the structure seemed silly. In the first piece our narrator tells another person that he's just written a story, which is, of course, the following piece in LwL, all the way until the last piece in which, predictably enough, the piece named is the first piece in LwL. This added roughly nothing to the work as a whole. Another reviewer argues, convincingly enough, that this is a device meant to plunge us ever further into the fictional realm, so that the second piece is a fiction in the first, the third a fiction in the second, and so on. I would like to believe this argument, but can't quite bring myself to accept it. The circularity just suggests the kind of pomo tricksiness that Murnane is wary of.

But despite this, LwL is another wonderful work. It's particularly interesting to read this back to back with Barley Patch. In the later work, the narrator claims to have no imagination. He says he can't "create" characters or plot or anything. Here, our narrator (I'm fairly confident the narrators are the same personage) tells us that "If I needed to think of my ruling faculty I thought of my imagination... a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours." That's a pretty good summary of Murnane's method, as later summed up in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, and suggests either that the denial of imagination in Barley Patch is ironic (highly unlikely, given our author) or that the meaning of "imagination" differs in the two (three) works. ( )
  stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
Showing by doing absolutely nothing but telling is the curious destabilizing strategy adopted by Gerald Murnane in Landscape with Landscape. His use of the first-person point of view is relentless and strangely effective. There is no dialogue; he has distanced himself from the forms called the novel and the short story, and written instead “fictions” which inhabit a silkily shifting undefinable zone between personal diary, autobiography, and hybrid autofiction. The literary allusions read like a mature student’s history of his academic soul, and the timid seemingly wannabe Don Juan narrator’s reticence with women combined with his microscopic attention to and retention of female detail, down to the last freckle, is odd and interesting. As John Gardner says in On Becoming a Novelist, inevitably the best writers have a certain strangeness of style. This is true of Murnane’s prose. Once you give up on categorizing his writing and just flow with it, Murnane will frequently reward you with sentences that sparkle like shards of obsidian in white granite. Here are a few examples:

“And by way of saying goodbye the publisher pointed a little east of north (which was exactly the direction of the writer’s own suburb) and told him to spend every afternoon going from door to door in his suburb, introducing himself as a writer to every young woman who was at home alone, telling her he was looking for material for his next book of fiction, then having an affair with every one of the dozens who would volunteer, and finally urging each of the women to buy the book when it was published and to tell her friends to buy it.”

“At some time in my imagined future I would have wanted to see my landscape as a private place marked off from all others: a place that distinguished me as surely as a pattern of freckles could distinguish a woman.”

“Her face was carefully made up. Whenever she had to concentrate on her driving I looked sideways at the faultless texture of her cheeks and the shiny spicules of silver under her eyebrows and saw into a part of Australia I had scarcely thought about. I saw into ten thousand bathrooms all over Melbourne in the hot, slack hours of Saturday afternoon when young women were getting ready to go out with their regular boy friends.”

“And in the hour before sunrise when I woke to hear Carolyn’s bare feet on my floor as she passed on the way back from the bathroom, and when I heard her pause in the middle of my room and step very quietly towards my bed, and I knew she was standing only a little way from me in the grey half-light, shivering slightly in her thin shortie pyjamas, looking down on me and ready, if I opened my eyes, to sit on the edge of my bed and discuss seriously what she would have called my emotional problem, even then I went on breathing easily and kept my eyes closed until she understood that between the two of us was a broad zone of dreams she knew nothing about, and she turned and went back to her bed.”

“The bar had windows of thick, orange-gold frosted glass, and when I looked towards a window through my beer I felt at a safe distance from Melbourne, ready to go home to my bachelor’s flat and write like a man in the depths of the north: at two removes from the unpoetic experiences of his early years.”

“I began at last to feel that a whole continent was spread out inside me. The feel of its immense prairies and its ten thousand lakes made me no longer anxious to impress the Paraguayans around me or to treat with their young women. I thought I could be content to wait for years until a few discerning people recognised me as a man with a vast and foreign land behind my face.”

“I used to lead the boy to the cases of birds and stand beside him silently, hoping his eye might be taken by all those other eyes – tiny, dark, and staring fixedly at something that was in our world if only we could focus on it.”

“I might have been satisfied, I thought, if the only landscape that seemed my preserve was a dark and complex series of back lounges of hotels each framed within the other and stretching along a sort of tunnel within the ordinary cheerful daylight of Victoria from that bayside suburb to a remote western town, nothing of which was visible around the dark mousehole where I tossed down the last pinpoint of gold, the molten drop that dissolved what was left of my liver and killed me.”

“I was reassured to think of the women of my own city clothing themselves in the same colours that lay just beneath my own skin.”

“Now I was ready to take up my life’s work of searching for the many skeins still missing from the huge, coloured fabric strung between my nervous system and the world. I would be helped in this work by a young woman whose preferred colours could lie like wild stripes among my own. And the promptings of my nerves suggested that the art teacher was such a woman.”

“If I needed to think of my ruling faculty I thought of my imagination – not as something with any colour or shape but as a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours.”

“I could have been still standing on a rectangle of asphalt, a road cut off at its beginnings, while I went on looking at the thick trunks and the many layers of leaves in the place that was more quiet than any I had known.” ( )
  VicCavalli | Jul 14, 2019 |
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Landscape with Landscape is Gerald Murnane's fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. 'I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years,' Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In hindsight it can be seen to contain some of his best writing, and to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, 'The Battle of Acosta Nu', is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.

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